These attachments are also known, in particular, under the name of corn picker heads. These are known to a person skilled in the art in various designs. The object of these attachments for field choppers consists in cutting the standing corn plants during forward travel and transporting the cut plants further in such a way that they pass into the intake region or into the intake gap of the intake housing of the field chopper. Attachments are known having a plurality of rotationally driven cutting and conveying drums which lie next to one another transversely with respect to the travel and working direction and have disk-shaped intake elements which lie on top of one another, are equipped with conveying pockets and are additionally assigned transverse conveying and deflection elements in the rear region.
The cutting and conveying drums or cutting and conveying elements are driven by the internal combustion engine of the carrier vehicle, in a manner which starts via a mechanically driven drive train, a drive train which extends transversely with respect to the travel direction and on which the required drive moments for the cutting and conveying elements are tapped off by means of angular gear mechanisms being mounted ahead of the cutting and conveying elements. A drive of this type is known, for example, from DE19544182. If blockages occur during the continuous cutting and harvesting process, the harvesting process has to be interrupted by stopping the travel movement of the carrier vehicle and the blockage has to be eliminated by reversing the drive. DE 19653367 has disclosed a reversing drive of this type. Here, the drive of the intake rollers of the intake housing of the chopper and that of the attachment has its rotational direction reversed and is decoupled from the drive of the chopping drum in the process. It is disadvantageous here that all the cutting and conveying elements are also driven during reversing and the entire harvested goods which are situated in the attachment and in the intake housing and therefore still in front of the chopping drum are conveyed back and remain on the field as debris. Here, the greater the working width, the greater the debris which remains behind.